


into her own hands

by Triskaidekalogue



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, FemSlashEx
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-19
Updated: 2014-10-19
Packaged: 2018-02-21 17:28:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2476394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Triskaidekalogue/pseuds/Triskaidekalogue





	into her own hands

**Author's Note:**

  * For [brilligspoons](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brilligspoons/gifts).



The Princess's body was made to be taken apart. Her mothers, it was said, had labored a year and day over its construction before slotting in the circuitry of her intelligence. Had she awoken knowing how to reshape herself? Or had she learned the slow way, from mothers' teaching or from misadventure? It had been years since any of the mothers had ventured into the public gaze, except Scribe-mother, who spoke only to the Princess in the private code of mother and daughter. But the Princess's experiments, which grew less and less frequent, left little doubt as to her mastery of the skill.

The first time Garrison had witnessed her Princess exercising this transformational capacity was at the end of their term in the embassy. The embassy was a human bestowal built at the far edge of one of their cities. The Princess had fashioned herself after the human style in those days, brass fittings buffed and curved to mimic mute skin tones and fine steel armor all worked with organic patterns. The bomb had barely managed to dent Garrison's reinforced alloy shell, but twists of brass and steel now folded into one another, scattered across the ruin of the room. Of the alloy housing that protected the Princess's core, there was no sign.

Garrison considered calling out for her, but she did not know if the Princess would be able to answer.

She found her at last flung down into the conference theater. The explosion had stripped her right side, exposing the bones and vital modules that had been cast from harder substances. A clear rivulet tracked its shining path down the remnant of her face plate; for a moment, Garrison's code shrilled, _Tears, tears, client in distress_. But her kind did not cry. It was only the prism of the Princess's eye, melted in the same fierce heat that had strewn half her shell through the greeting-room.

 _We are machine folk,_ she told herself sternly, as if she could rewrite her own code by will alone, and forced herself to step down into the theater. She focused on the exposed half of her Princess's body, which did not trigger a cascade of alarms that presumed she served a human master, and contemplated how best to transport the Princess to safety. She had never asked about the Princess's memory configuration. It hadn't seemed any of her business. This, she saw now, was a misjudgment. How could she preserve the most of her Princess if she knew nothing of safe transfer protocols? What use would it be to repair her components if a misalignment of seemingly innocuous plates wiped her memory?

"Is that you, Garrison?" the Princess said suddenly. "I can hear your core humming."

"It is," said Garrison. She hadn't noticed humming. She supposed that the explosion might have knocked a spinner awry; she would have an artificer look at it when they were both safely away. "We should leave, Princess. I dispatched the human who set the bomb when it returned to confirm our destruction, but there may be others. How is your memory configured? Will it be safe for me to carry you in this state?"

"Not very," the Princess admitted. "But I can change that if you help me realign my arm and strip the brass from its fingers. And once you've taken us somewhere less vulnerable, I can take the time to detach most of the rest of this shell as well. I'm already open anyway, and it's too recognizable, if you fear for my safety."

"Every moment," Garrison said promptly and with complete sincerity. She had already knelt to do as her Princess had asked, environmental sensors calibrated to full sensitivity as she unjammed the Princess's remaining arm and unsheathed alloy claws to carefully shear away the brass skin of its five-fingered hand.

The Princess opened and closed her reactivated hand, testing. Its joints whirred disconcertingly, but each of its newly denuded fingers seemed to have maintained the full range of motion. Garrison watched as those fingers tapped a sequence across the catches and levers of one of the alloy modules.

"Empty," said the Princess, though Garrison knew her visual sensors were too badly damaged to have possibly picked up something as subtle as a gaze. "I reformatted onto some spare plates while you were fixing my arm. They only need to be transferred into a hermetic environment now, and I haven't been using this module for much. That's the problem with -- "

Footsteps approached from the edge of her sensory radius. Peacekeeper or thug? Garrison had to consider the possibility that they were one and the same.

"Hurry, Princess," she said. "We have company, and I don't know if it will be pleasant company."

The copper memory plates clicked into place one by one, their dense-packed, minuscule punches iridescing faintly in the predawn gray. The footsteps drew closer in counterpoint.

"Would that I had finer hands!" she burst out. "Would that I could help!"

"Nonsense," said the Princess. Click, _step_ click. "Your hands would have to be as small as coins to miss tangling with mine if we worked all at the same time. Though that's not a bad idea for the next shell. Nested, or a spare attachment..." -- _step_ click, _step_ click -- "but never mind that. You are my bodyguard, Garrison. You are my place of safety. That is help enough, and more."

 _Click_ step, _click_ step. "Much good I have been," said Garrison bitterly.

"You have been," the Princess rejoined (step, _click_ step), and Garrison fell silent. The footsteps began to drown out the sound of the slotting plates; Garrison could hear them both, but her system bristled _danger danger_ and pushed the latter into a distant background of safe trivialities. Wordlessly, she unsheathed her claws again.

"Seventy-nine seconds," said the Princess in reply.

Seventy-seven seconds would be ample time for the average stride to reach them at that pace.

"We may need to flee before you are finished, Princess," Garrison warned.

"I trust you," the Princess said simply.

 

In fact, their visitor arrived with a good half-minute to spare. It was a tall, heavy human in peacekeeper's uniform, and when it cast its light on Garrison looming protectively over her Princess's mangled shell, it reached for its shock baton.

"No fear, Peacekeeper," said Garrison. "The Princess is merely recuperating. The one who did this will not threaten us further."

"Taken care of him already, have you?" said the peacekeeper. It eyed her naked claws. "Why the fierce seeming still?"

Garrison drew a single phoneme from her voicebox, but hesitated. She locked eyes with the peacekeeper for a moment. Then she launched herself at it, and at the same instant, it sent an arc of electricity crackling over her shell. The shock baton shorted out Garrison's visual sensors, but it was easy enough to pinpoint the human's position from the harsh rasp of its breathing, the vibration of its feet striking cracked tilestones. She struck, and was rewarded with a hiss of pain and another jolt of electricity. Again she struck, and a third time, hearing the loud hum of her own core ( _she was right, I must have disaligned something_ ).

The human cursed. Garrison thought that perhaps she had hit something important. She drew from her own memory banks and broadcast a large predator's snarl; her shell reshaped it, lent it a metallic ring that sent the human scrambling away.

"We'll be _back_ , you ugly jumped-up counting machines!" it snarled back in a weak echo of Garrison's recording. Its footsteps clattered away, much quicker and sharper than they had been during its approach.

 

The Princess had finished sometime during the brief confrontation. Over the sound of the human's fading footsteps, Garrison heard her reclasping the latches of the newly built memory module.

" _Now_ we flee," she said to the Princess. "If it brings back reinforcements, I may not be able to fight them all off without vision."

The Princess reached out her hand, and Garrison lifted her up. Tile crunched under her heavy tread as she ran from the ruined embassy, ignoring the mutterings of rudely woken humans and the astonished exclamations that trailed her flight: a hulk of a metal woman racing at impossible speed through the streets of the city outskirts, cradling a tattered brass form in her arms. She did not stop running until she had placed twenty minutes between themselves and any sound of human presence. Then she slowed and tried to focus her sight, which was returning bit by bit as her system repaired itself.

"We're near the abandoned factory, Princess," Garrison told her. "We can stop and do some basic repairs on your shell, if you wish."

The Princess played a laugh. "More than that," she said. "Oh, I know the bulk of it must wait until we are back in the outpost, but why weigh you down with useless shell on the way? It's time, I think, for a new structure, and I can discard much of what's left of this human costume to start -- no," she interrupted when Garrison made to speak, "I don't find your form unpleasant at all, Garrison, only that mine wasn't so sturdily made, and I could hear your core protesting every time you looked at this wreck of a human face."

"Princess -- "

" -- doesn't want you overclocking like that. I'm made to be remade, Garrison. You shouldn't have to ache over a broken shell when the rest of you knows that."

 

Garrison's visuals did not fully recover until one of the outpost's resident artificers had taken a hand to them. By the time she emerged from the workshop, having postponed her spinner realignment for a second session, the Princess had completed her rebuild: a broad, stately shape barely human in the inspiration of its lines and curves, utility limbs tucked neatly into recesses encircling the shell. Garrison did not know what to make of it. She had not been raised among machine folk. She had been designed to read humans, for all that meant dividing all into _client_ , _threat_ , and _irrelevant_. But in the brass veneer of the new shell, in the motion of its primary limbs, Garrison recognized the Princess she had chosen to serve, and when the Princess spoke, the familiarity of it filled Garrison with such a sense of glad rightness that she thought her core had realigned all on its own.


End file.
